


Let the only sound be the overflow...

by JoyfullyyoursDav



Series: Never Let Me Go (Twins' Mom AU series) [1]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Bad Parenting, Canon Compliant, Canon Trans Character, Canon Universe, Child Abandonment, Dysfunctional Family, Elf Culture & Customs, Elves, Elvish, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Long Lost/Secret Relatives, Memories, Motherhood, Original Character(s), Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Regret, Twins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-03-10
Packaged: 2019-03-29 07:37:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13922430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoyfullyyoursDav/pseuds/JoyfullyyoursDav
Summary: Before Taako and Lup were intergalactic heroes, before they were two of seven birds, before they were accomplished wizards, before they were outcast and not alone...they were babies. And they had a mother.And lately, she's been hearing stories.





	Let the only sound be the overflow...

**Author's Note:**

> I think about Taako and Lup's mom a lot, okay?  
> Title is from "What the Water Gave Me" by Florence and The Machines.
> 
> There's a couple mentions of Lup's assigned gender, but hopefully it's clear that Taako *always* had a sister. :)
> 
> This is potentially the first in a series - I'll have to see how it goes!

When the elf named Leema first started hearing the rumors, her chest constricted in a way that was not entirely unfamiliar. The rumors became stories and the stories became legends. It was said that a group of seven explorers had left this world on a silver ship, disappearing long ago. Before the Darkness, before the Ever-Night descended on this world, the seven explorers had escaped, destined to save the world from the dark. And they had. These seven birds, immortal and unshakable, flying steadily toward their destiny, had spent a lonely century restoring the universe. The evidence was all around them, in the sun and the air, the trees and the water. In the way their world was no longer hungry.

These stories gave Leema a funny feeling she couldn’t put words to. And slowly, more details about the seven travelers began floating around town. Their names were repeated again and again. The Wordless One. The Protector. The Lover. The Lonely Journal-Keeper. The Peacemaker.

The Twins.

“Twins, you say?” Leema asked a store clerk, the first person to share this information with her, and the funny feeling gripped her once again. “What race? What age? Do you know?”

The clerk looked at Leema with a furrowed brow. “I don’t,” he replied. “A male and a female, they say. One of fire and one of stone, but who knows what that really means?” He paused, then said, “Golems, do you reckon?”

But Leema wasn’t listening. They couldn’t be _her_ twins, then. The babies that she had called Lemb and Teru, the words for the Elvish letters; _lemb_ for Leema, _teru_ for their father. Names they could carry with them, if they wished. Truly, they had only really felt like _hers_ when they were first born, bundled up and handed to her like parcels ready for travel. They were identical, but Leema could tell them apart immediately; could not, in fact, understand how others struggled to do so. The twins were more like mirror images of each other than exact copies. One of them had a smile crooked on the left side, while the other’s was crooked on the right. They could be identified by their asymmetry, and so few people were attuned to asymmetry like Leema was.

She hadn’t seen them since they were very small, five or six years old. Holding hands and staring at her dolefully as though she was a stranger. Even now, she sometimes called them _mine_ in her head, but truthfully, they had not been hers since they had been the small bundles, mere letters, immobile and static as if on a page.

Elves believed that twins were unlucky, a bad omen. Newborns marked a beginning, but twins marked both a beginning and an end. Leema didn’t believe in this superstition at first—but then the twins’ father left one day and didn’t return. And then Leema’s mother died, suddenly and without warning, making her an orphan. And her affinity for life’s pleasures, always slightly problematic in her youth, grew and grew to a sickness. She left before the twins’ first birthday, thinking it was better to spare them. To be spared.

These twin birds from the stories _couldn’t_ be the same ones she had left. And yet, it had been more than a hundred years since she had seen or heard from her children. Worried of what she’d find, she hadn’t ever looked before now. But the stories of the seven birds kept floating back to her, as if carried on the wind. At the market, on the street outside her home. Mention of the mysterious heroes even slipped from a few of her lovers’ mouths, over dinner, casually dropped like careless grenades. There was no escaping it, and she was tormented by all that she didn’t know.

So Leema wrote letters. She posted advertisements, looking for twin elves once called Lemb and Teru, who may be going by different names. No surname, because elves abandoned in childhood were only given one name upon adulthood. With no luck and in desperation, Leema even traveled to New Elfington, to seek out family members who used to live there. She managed to find only one, a distant cousin of hers named Pik, who the twins had lived with for a time. “Sorry to call on you like this,” Leema told him after hugs had been exchanged.

“No trouble at all,” Pik said. “Here, have a seat.” And they sat together on the front porch, in slightly awkward silence. Pik fiddled with a pipe, lighting it and sucking on it while he studied his cousin thoughtfully.

“I was wondering if you’d heard from the twins at all, since they lived here,” Leema finally said, the words coming out in a rush.

Pik frowned deeply. “Oh. No, I’m afraid not. They only stayed with me a couple months, you know. I’m not sure how much I can help you.”

“I understand,” Leema said. “How old were they, Pik? When they were here?”

“Oh, about eleven, I’d say.”

“And do you know where they went once they left you?” Leema asked.

Pik scratched his chin, suddenly looking a little agitated. He sighed before responding. “You gotta understand, Leema. Times were tough back then for Maritt and me. And to get these two kids dropped on our doorstep one day. Kids who…well, if I’m being honest, were kind of…feral. One of ‘em lit half the living room on fire, and neither one would rat out the other. When we sent ‘em away, we didn’t really…keep track of ‘em.”

“I’m not here to cast any judgment,” Leema said. “And I definitely don’t expect that you kept track of them. I’m just looking for any information. As much as I can get. That’s all.”

Pik crossed his arms and sighed. “Can I ask you something, cousin?”

Leema nodded. “Sure.”

“Why are you doing this to yourself? After all these years, isn’t it better to leave it alone?”

“Probably,” Leema agreed. “It’s just…I’m sure you’ve heard the stories. The seven birds that left this world and saved the universe. There’s talk that two of them were twins, and it just…it got me thinking about Teru and Lemb. That’s all.”

Pik’s eyes widened slightly. “Ah. I see.”

“I know it’s not them,” Leema hurried on, before Pik thought she was losing her mind. “I mean, the odds of that! Plus, these twins, they’re apparently a male and female, so they're definitely not my boys. And I don’t even know if they’re elves, or how old they are, or anything about them, really—”

Pik cleared his throat. “Ah, Leema. Don’t you know…?”

“What?”

“Well, first off, the twins weren’t Teru and Lemb when they came to me,” Pik told her, his voice steady and serious. “They called themselves Taako and Lup. A bit young to have picked their adult names, but hell, they’d been through enough, so we let it pass. Called ‘em whatever they wanted.”

“Taako and Lup.” Leema whispered the names aloud, just to get a sense of the shape, the rhythm. How eerie, to have given birth over a hundred years ago to children whose names you didn’t know, had never spoken.

“And there’s another thing,” Pik continued. “Lup is…she’s a girl.”

“What?”

“She came here as a girl and I honestly didn’t know any different,” Pik said. “Funny thing is, I remember asking them about it once, because I thought you’d said that you’d had two boys back when they were first born. But Taako told me he’d always had a sister, so I figured I must be remembering it wrong.”

“Lup was…female?” Leema asked.

“Yeah. Again, they were only here a short while. But the children that stayed with me were definitely a girl and a boy.”

Leema wrapped her shawl more tightly around her shoulders, suddenly feeling cold. “So…they _could_ be the twins from the stories, then? The ones everyone’s talking about?”

“Anything’s possible,” Pik said, taking a long drag on his pipe. “Wouldn’t that be wild, eh? Having a couple of famous heroes in our family? That would really be something.”

“Yeah,” Leema said, but she wasn’t listening anymore. She was staring off down the quiet street, drowning in thought. She imagined two birds, nestled in a baby-blanket nest. She thought about a pair of small children wearing clothes two sizes too big, hands clasped together, feet planted, ready to run. She pictured mirror-image infants, sleeping peacefully in a shared bassinet. Leema decided then, sitting on that porch in the town where she’d once lived and loved, that she had to find them. She had to find the legendary twins whose birth marked the beginning and end of herself as a mother. Whose destiny had been to save a world that had done nothing for them but cast them off as omens. The children _of_ her but not hers, who had reshaped themselves into something she could hardly imagine, done things she couldn’t dream.

 _Taako and Lup._ She whispered their names one more time, allowing herself that, before standing and walking down the porch steps, toward whatever was waiting to be known. Toward the ashes of the life she had burned.


End file.
